An idle Venezuelan tanker with millions of gallons of oil is creating panic in Trinidad
More than 20 months after a Venezuelan oil tanker carrying nearly 55 million gallons of crude oil was abandoned off the country’s northern coast following tightened U.S. sanctions, inspectors from neighboring Trinidad and Tobago will finally get a chance to see for themselves if the idle vessel’s cargo could lead to a major ecological disaster off the Caribbean coast of South America.
Trinidad and Tobago’s energy and foreign ministers both confirmed to the Miami Herald that a team will head out Tuesday to visit the Venezuelan-flagged floating storage and offloading vessel Nabarima, which environmentalists say is taking on water and threatening to spill 1.3 million barrels of oil into the gulf between both countries.
The ship is in the Gulf of Paria, between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.
While Nabarima is flying under a Venezuelan flag, it is operated by the Petrosucre company, a joint venture between the Venezuelan state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, PDVSA, and the Italian Eni oil giant. After the Trump administration slapped sanctions on PDVSA in January 2019, Petrosucre stopped its oil extraction and the ship was left off the eastern coast of Venezuela with millions of barrels of crude oil.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/idle-venezuelan-tanker-millions-gallons-232329239.html
